Half-way there (well, more like a quarter really)

This past tuesday marked the end of my 6th week in Japan, Thursday the end of my 6th week of classes. With 12 weeks of classes total, and an exit flight scheduled for December 23, I have reached the halfway point of my studies here at Yamasa. Or have I? In fact, today I got myself signed up for another 3 months, lasting from January 25th to April 18th. The Adventure Time Party continues!

Smart people with brains that have good memories will recall that originally I had a different program in mind for the Winter/Spring "semester." This program would have had an emphasis on collegiate-level study of Japanese Culture and History, which is fine with me, except that you only take 3 classes of Japanese a week, which is waaaay insufficient for my burning desire to comfortably speak this language, since Japanese is HARD. We're talking English-hard, and English is notoriously clunky, difficult, and generally stupid. The big difference between Japanese and English is that Japanese replaces clunkiness with beauty, and stupidity with severe oddity.

I'll explain the beauty part first. Japanese has always sounded really silly to most Americans I know, including myself. However, as I got here and started to learn and experience, my thoughts quickly changed. In Japanese, word pronounciation is set up to make sentences flow as nicely as possible, and the general construction of each word really puts the focus on the sound of the vowel instead of the type of consonant. Throw in the fact that the 5 vowel sounds used, ah ee uu eh oh, are about the five nicest vowel sounds you could choose from, and you end up with a language that really focuses on sounding pleasant and making sense to the ears. This is in opposition to english, which throws consonants and horrible vowel sounds (think the "a" sound from "and" and "can't"), and ends up being clunky and silly sounding, when you think about it.

But enough praise. Japanese is hard. Really, really hard. In fact, everyone hear who has studied multiple languages, including people like Christian, who has studied German, English, French, and Chinese to fluency, calls Japanese the most difficult language they have studied by a huge margin. The reason for this is not because of how you say the words, but how the words come together. I'd always heard that Chinese was hard due to the various "tones" you can use for each vowel, but Japanese is a whole different beast. It cares nothing for tones, and is in fact quite a flat language, phrase-wise. This makes accents so easy that anyone who studies Japanese to fluency will have a mostly indistinguishable non-regional accent. The variations you get from place to place in Japan end up being where you place emphasis on your words and actual word choice, giving a whole new definition to the word "accent."

But whereas Chinese has, according to Christian, a relatively easy grammar system to learn, Japanese grammar is hard, and then harder. Let's start as broad as possible. There are two hugely different ways to speak Japanese: formal style and plain style. They are used for exactly what they sound like. Everyone speaks plain style, and formal is reserved for talking with important superiors, and to strangers (although strangers tend to speak plain style anyways). Formal style and plain style are worlds apart. In formal style, the base ending of all verbs is "masu." In plain style, the base ending of verbs is changes depending on the conjugation. In first conjugation, which is most of the verbs in Japanese, you take the vowel before, which is always "i," and change it to "u." In second conjugation, which is all the verbs that end in "emasu" in formal style, as well as other excpetions that you have to memorize, you replace "masu" with "ru." In third conjugation, which is the verbs "shimasu" and "kimasu" exclusively, you use "suru" and "kuru." Sounds complicated, and it is, although by learning formal style first, plain style verbs are really quite easy to master.

The trickery really heats up when you get to actual sentence structure. The first time you take a foreign language, which will almost always be a germanic or romantic language, you are told that there are 2 types of languages: ones based on word ending (romantic and a lot of other languages), and ones based on word order (english and some other languages). Well, Japanese is both. And neither. See, isn't this fun already? You already know that verbs are based on endings, although thankfully, there are only 4 endings per style. In Japanese, there is no distinction between singular and plural. No need for an ending there. There is also no distinction between present and future. No need for different endings there, either. Basically, it boils down to 4 combinations: Positive and negative versions of past and non-past verbs. I won't explain the endings, since you don't need to know them, I'm just trying to convey difficulty.

Adjectives also follow this rule. In fact, adjectives often function like verbs, and sometimes vice versa. Wheeeeeeeeee! So there are 4 of the same combinations of endings explained for adjectives. But wait, there's actually more! There are two types of adjectives. Those that end in "i" and those that end in "na" if and only if they directly precede the nouns they modify (this will not happen ever if the adjective functions like a verb, which happens far too frequently). The combinations of endings are totally different for each group of adjectives.

Thankfully, nouns are just nouns, adverbs just adverbs, and everything else also just has one ending. This is where order comes into play. In a basic sentence kernel (ignoring all of the extra modifiers in sentences), the order is subject-object-verb. Verbs always, always, always come last. Never do verbs not come last. This is very important. However, just as important as order is particles. Particles are monosyllabic sounds that end each and every noun. The two most crucial particles are "wa" (mysteriously spelled using the "ha" character for no reason) and "o." "Wa" indicates the subject, and "o" the object.

Let us use this knowledge to construct a basic sentence kernel. Because it is what everyone speaks, I'll use plain form. "I eat rice" in Japanese is "Boku wa gohan o taberu."

Now immediately I must point out that I forgot that there are weird rules for what you are allowed to say. In Japanese, "I" is "watashi," and that's what everyone would say in formal style, but in plain form, men are supposed to say "boku," and there are more special cases like this for other words. Sorry, women, you don't have special exceptions, since you are considered inferior in Japan. That's life.

In any case, in that sentence "boku" was followed by "wa" to indicate that it was the subject. "Tegami" was followed by "o" to indicate that it was the object. And so on and so forth.

New basic sentence: "I go to school." "Boku wa gakkou e iku."

I've thrown in a new kink here, because when you are using a verb indicating movement to a place, that place is followed by the particle "e" (spelled using the "he" symbol, again for no reason). Yay!

Let's add some rules. Modifiers come before the modified word(s). "Everday, I quickly go to good school." "Mainichi boku wa ii gakkou e hayaku iru." So, what word means what? From the rule I explained, you should be able to deduce this. "Everyday" modifies the whole sentence, so it must go first. "Good" must come before "school," and "quickly" before "go." Okay, so this isn't that bad, right?

Wrong. Now, I will introduce the particles "de" and "ni." "De" is used to indicate something that you use to complete an action, or to indicate where an action takes place (with one exception). "Ni," or as I'm going to call it, "satan," is used for EVERYTHING ELSE. Seriously, "ni" is one versatile mother******. This might seem good, except that it will always have you second-guessing yourself. Furthermore, the exception with "de" that I hinted about will cause your brain to explode when trying to figure out which particle to use. You use "de" to explain where you do an action in. "Ni" describes where you do an action at. Sound like the same thing? That's because it is. Except, to the Japanese it isn't. The sentence "We watched a movie in my room" would be "watashitachi wa boku no heya de eiga o mita" (Oops, forgot to explain "no." It's easy enough. "No" indicates possession, at the order is always possessor no possessee). However, "We watched a movie at my house" would be "watashitachi wa boku no uchi ni eiga o mita." Arrrrrrrrrgh.

Eventually, you might actually get the hang of the particles. Then the crazy sentence constructions occur. And they are ridiculous. I'm not going to give the Japanese, I will just explain with the English counterparts. Most of the sentence constructions involve adding an ending to a verb ending (verb endings themselves conjugate like adjectives) and then some mind-bending phrase. When asking for permission, or if someone has something, or anything like that where you are fishing for a yes or no answer, you ask the question in a superfluously fluffy manner, and usually with a negative verb (do you not have, will you not go, etc). To add a modifying clause (in english this would involve inserting a "that" or "would" into the sentence), you put the clause first, change all wa's to ga's, use the plain form verb even if speaking formally, and then do the main sentence. Often, the Japanese use this construction when it is totally redundant or unnecessary. Perhaps my favorite is "must." There appears to be no direct equivalent to "must" in Japanese (this happens a lot). Instead, the Japanese say "there have no choice but to," and the ending consturction used to say this is quite literally a tongue twisted. I challenge you to say "nakeriba narimasen" 3 times fast.

And all that is only a taste of the wonders of Japanese. I haven't even gotten to the verb "to be," which is irregular in pretty much every language known to man. Well, in Japanese, it is irregularly irregular, but it is almost 4 AM, so I'm not going to explain it. Instead, I'm going to stare at my eyelids. Ask me about it the next time you see me.

Okay, so if it sounds like I'm venting, I'm not...really. Venting would imply negative stress, which is not the case. I'm simultaneously trying to convety the difficulty, as well as challenge myself to see how much I can remember, since such reminders are constantly necessary in the quest for long-term memory of a language. The fact is, I love that it is so unique and difficult, because it will make mastering the language that much more satisfying. In a mere 6 weeks, I have learned an absolute truckload, as you can see, so imagine what I can do in 6 months. That is the reason why I am opting to double my length of study an Okazaki, and hopefully do a homestay in the process, since learning the concepts isn't much of a problem for me, but getting comfortable in conversation is, and a homestay would be a great way to remedy that. So, yeah.